"He made a place, you said," Shan interjected. "You mean a hiding place?"

She paid him no attention. She seemed interested only in Yeshe now, as if she saw in him something no one else, including Yeshe himself, could see.

"Who would take him? What was he scared of?" Yeshe pressed on. "Prosecutor Jao?"

"Not Jao. Jao was good to him. Gave him extra ration cards sometimes. Let him wear his clothes sometimes."

"Then who?"

She wrinkled her brow and studied Yeshe. "Your powers are not destroyed," she said. "You think they are. But they are just hidden."

Yeshe retreated a step, as though frightened. "Where is Balti?" he asked. A pleading tone had entered his voice.

"A boy like that, he goes up. Or he goes down." She chuckled as she considered her words, and looked at the herdsman. "Up or down," she repeated to him with another laugh. She turned back to Yeshe. "If they took him, he'll still come back. As a lion he'll come back. That's what happens to the meek ones. He will return as a lion and rip us all to shreds for failing him."

Shan knelt in front of the woman. "Show us the hiding place," he whispered.

She did not seem to hear. "Show us," Yeshe asked. She fidgeted with her wares, confused.

"We need to see it," Shan pressed. "Balti needs us to see it."

"He was so scared," she said.

"I think he was brave."

She acknowledged him at last. "He cried at night."

"Even a brave man can have reasons to cry."

She kept her eyes from him. "What if you are the ones he feared?"

"Look at us. Is that what you think? Would they come and talk to you this way?" He pressed her arm. She slowly looked up, as if it were painful to see Shan's eyes.

"Not him," she said, nodding to Yeshe. "He isn't one of them."

"Then do it for him," Shan said.

She moved quickly now, as if eager to be rid of them. The herdsman with the staff came also, following them into the garage. They moved into the shadows at the back of the structure, past their truck. Feng was snoring loudly.

A rough wooden rack had been built to hold large parts salvaged from vehicles. On the bottom was a row of long, narrow gas tanks removed from cars and trucks.

She put her hand on the third tank. "He was small enough to go behind," she said. Shan and Yeshe manhandled the tank from the rack. The rear had been neatly cut away, the edges bent so it could be pushed back into place. A ribbon of grease covered the seam. Shan found a screwdriver and pried it open.

Inside there was no briefcase, only a soiled envelope with several sheets of onionskin paper.

The woman helped them return the tank to the rack, then turned to Yeshe once more. "Your powers are not destroyed," she said again. "They have only lost their focus."

Yeshe seemed paralyzed by the words. As Shan pulled him to the truck, calling for Feng to wake up, Yeshe was unable to take his eyes from the woman. He held his rosary as they drove to the opposite side of town. He did not count the beads, but only looked at it. "In Sichuan," he said suddenly. "I could have my own apartment."

Sitting behind Feng, Shan studied the papers from the tank. They had been ripped out of an investigation file, the file on the murder of Jin San, manager of Long Wall agricultural collective, the crime for which Dza Namkhai of the Lhadrung Five had been executed. At the bottom of the last sheet was a long series of Arabic numbers, five groups of five digits each.

"Powers," Yeshe said in a haunted tone. "What a woman. Great powers. The world bears witness to my great powers."

Shan looked up. "Don't be so quick to condemn yourself. The greatest power, I think, is the power to tell right from wrong."

Yeshe considered Shan's words. "But it never feels like right or wrong," he said at last. "It seems more like deciding which devil is least destructive."

"What did she mean," Shan asked, "when she said a groan that could reach the next world?"

"Sound is like a thought with legs, some of the old gompas taught. If you can put the right focus in your thought you can see beyond this world. If you put the right focus in a sound you can actually reach and touch the other world."

"Touch it?"

"It is supposed to create a rift between worlds. Like a lightning bolt. The rift has incredible energy. Some call it the thunder ritual. It can destroy things."

Shan looked back at the papers. The woman had said someone would come for him, meaning someone other than Jao. Balti had trusted Jao, as Jao had trusted him. An old file, a closed file, yet so secret Jao could not trust it in his own office. Or perhaps especially in his office.

"She said Balti would go up or go down," Shan recalled distractedly. "She thought it was a good line."

Yeshe still spoke in his haunted voice. "Go back to the Kham plateau, which is so high everywhere there is up compared to the rest of the world. Or stay and go down the chain of life forms."

Shan nodded slowly, trying to connect the words to the file. The scent was so strong it felt almost tangible. Who wanted the file? Someone would come, Balti had said. It wasn't the purbas. They hadn't known who he was. Even if they did, they wouldn't terrify Balti. Who would? The knobs? A criminal gang? Soldiers? Criminal soldiers? Whoever it was would not fret over killing Balti. They would have taken him that night, and would have made him talk, made him sing out every last detail of every secret, every hiding place. If the tank still held at least some of its secrets, Shan suddenly realized, then Balti was alive, and free.

Chapter Eleven

The road to the ragyapa village had been deliberately built to terminate two hundred feet short of the village, culminating in a large clearing where flat rocks were arranged as unloading platforms. As Sergeant Feng edged into the clearing, a small flatbed truck pulled out with unnecessary speed. Shan glimpsed a woman at the window. She was weeping.

Along the path to the village a donkey pulled a cart with a long thick bundle wrapped in canvas.

Yeshe, to Shan's surprise, was the first out. From the back he pulled a burlap sack of old apples and with a look of somber resolution began moving up the trail. As Shan stepped out, Feng took one look at the long bundle on the cart, then immediately locked the doors and raised the windows. As his last defense, he lit a cigarette and began filling the interior with smoke.

Shan was an alien to the ragyapa. They weren't accustomed to Han, dead or alive. They weren't accustomed to anyone but each other. Even other Tibetans seldom ventured near, except to leave the body of a loved one and a pouch of money or basket of goods in payment. In a cutter's village near Lhasa two soldiers had been killed for trying to film their work. Near Shigatse Japanese tourists had been beaten with leg bones when they got too close.

Shan quickly caught up and stayed one step behind Yeshe. "You look like you have a plan," he observed.

"Sure. To get out as quickly as possible," Yeshe said in a low voice.

An unwashed boy with long ragged hair sat on the earth near the first hut, stacking pebbles. He looked up at the visitors and shouted, not a warning cry but a cry of abrupt pain, as though he had been kicked. The sound brought a woman from the inside of the hut. With one hand she carried a dented teapot and with the other balanced a baby on her hip. She glanced at Shan, not looking into his eyes, but slowly surveying his body, as though measuring him for something.